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8 unusual facts about Nadia Boulanger


David Coffin

Coffin comes from a musical background: His father, Rev. William Sloane Coffin, studied to be a concert pianist with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, his grandfather was pianist Arthur Rubinstein, and his great-grandfather was Polish conductor Emil Mlynarski.

Edgewood College

The college’s summer sessions also attracted students, climaxing in the summers of 1943 and 1944 with the presence of the world-renowned musician Nadia Boulanger of the Ecole Normale in Paris.

Hugues Cuénod

In pre-war Vienna and Paris, he frequented aristocratic salons and worked with Nadia Boulanger, with whom he made a pioneering set of recordings of madrigals by Monteverdi in 1937; after the war, the new early-music boom relied heavily on his light, unmannered, natural sound.

Mary Chess

While in London Chess sent her daughter Carley to study with Nadia Boulanger, despite the composer's pessimistic assessment of the girl's aptitude for music.

Mordechai Seter

In 1937, he went to Paris, France, and studied composition at the Ecole Normal de Musique with composer Paul Dukas and with the great teacher Nadia Boulanger.

Octeto Buenos Aires

Unsure of which way to turn he disbanded his orchestra in 1950 and began to study classical music which took him to Paris in 1954, where he studied classical composition and counterpoint with Nadia Boulanger.

Piazzolla's Orquesta Típica

He concentrated now on the study of classical music, including a year in Paris with the French classical composition teacher Nadia Boulanger, before returning to Buenos Aires where he would finally commit himself to tango with the founding of his next ensemble, Octeto Buenos Aires, in 1955.

Ramón Chao

The same year he moved to Paris, France to study music with Nadia Boulanger and Lazare Lèvy.


Allen Shawn

He received a bachelor's degree from Harvard University, a Masters degree from Columbia University, and studied in France with Nadia Boulanger.

Éric Gaudibert

He studied piano and composition at the conservatory of Lausanne, particularly with Denise Bidal and Hans Haug, and later in Paris in the École Normale de Musique with Alfred Cortot, Henri Dutilleux and Nadia Boulanger.

Isadore Freed

Following this Freed went to Berlin where he briefly studied piano with Josef Weiss, and then to Paris where he studied composition with Ernst Bloch, Nadia Boulanger, Louis Vierne and Vincent d'Indy.

James Yannatos

Subsequent studies with Nadia Boulanger, Luigi Dallapiccola, Darius Milhaud, Paul Hindemith, and Philip Bezanson in composition, William Steinberg and Leonard Bernstein in conducting, and Hugo Kortschak and Ivan Galamian on violin took Yannatos to Yale University (B.M., M.M.), the University of Iowa (Ph.D.), Aspen, Tanglewood, and Paris.

John van Kesteren

After completing his studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Vera Schwarz in Salzburg, Van Kesteren was invited in 1954 to Berlin's Komische Oper to sing Nurreddin in Cornelius's The Barber of Baghdad under the direction of Walter Felsenstein and to sing the title role in the first performance in Germany of Rossini's Le comte Ory under the direction of Carl Ebert at the Stadtische Oper in 1956.

Juan Hidalgo Codorniu

After studying piano and composition in Barcelona and Paris with Nadia Boulanger and Bruno Maderna, in 1957 participates in the XII Internationale Ferienkurse Für Neue Musik festival in Darmstadt with his work "Ukanga", a serial-structural composition for five chamber ensembles.

Laura Karpman

Karpman worked with John Harbison at the Tanglewood Music Center, and attended Aspen Music School and the Ecole des Arts Americaines, where she worked with Nadia Boulanger.

Robert D. Levin

Levin attended the Brooklyn Friends School and Andrew Jackson High School, and spent his junior year studying music with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

Tan Crone

She studied at the Amsterdam Conservatory, then with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and finally in the United States at the New England Conservatory and Tanglewood.

Ulvi Cemal Erkin

He studied piano with Isidor Philippe, and composition with Jean and Noël Gallon and Nadia Boulanger at the Paris Conservatoire and the École Normale de Musique.


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